Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 unlikely to lead to Beijing's victory: Report

Even though such a scenario is avoided at best, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank from Washington DC has conducted war game simulations of a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026. The report accessed by US news outlet CNN outlines the consequences as lethal. The invasion would result in thousands of casualties among Chinese, United States, Taiwanese and Japanese forces, and it would be unlikely to result in a victory for Beijing, according to CSIS. 

The China-Taiwan conflict had been a hot topic in 2022 and continues to be in 2023 and has preoccupied military and political leaders in the Indo-Pacific and the West. A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious US military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated, says the report. At the end of the conflict, at least two US aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles", wrote CNN citing the report.

US news outlet CNN reviewed an advance copy of the report – titled “The First Battle of the Next War” – on the two dozen war scenarios run by CSIS, which said the project was necessary because previous government and private war simulations have been too narrow or too opaque to give the public and policymakers a true look at how conflict across the Taiwan Strait might play out.

What is the CSIS project?

What was once unthinkable—direct conflict between the United States and China—has now become a commonplace discussion in the national security community. Although Chinese plans are unclear, a military invasion is not out of the question and would constitute China’s most dangerous solution to its “Taiwan problem", said CSIS on their website. This CSIS project designed a wargame to model a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026 and ran it 24 times in a variety of scenarios. 

Insights across the 24 game iterations included the vulnerability of surface ships, the massive coalition aircraft losses on the ground, the effectiveness of long-range anti ship missiles, the critical importance of Taiwanese ground forces, and the need for access to operating bases in Japan.  Based on the insights, the project makes a variety of recommendations to strengthen deterrence. “There’s no unclassified war game out there looking at the US-China conflict,” told Mark Cancian to CNN, one of the three project leaders and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Of the games that are unclassified, they’re usually only done once or twice.”

A bleak future for Taiwan

The simulations pointed to a devastating future for Taiwan even if a Chinese invasion is not frutiful. “While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services,” the report said. The island’s army would suffer about 3,500 casualties, and all 26 destroyers and frigates in its navy will be sunk, the report said, according to CNN. 

Japan is likely to lose more than 100 combat aircraft and 26 warships while US military bases on its home territory come under Chinese attack, the report found. But CSIS said it did not want its report to imply a war over Taiwan “is inevitable or even probable.” “The Chinese leadership might adopt a strategy of diplomatic isolation, gray zone pressure, or economic coercion against Taiwan,” it said.